


A Name To Believe In

by Lenora_Rose



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 06:27:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lenora_Rose/pseuds/Lenora_Rose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Jayne Cobb leaves, Canton tries to reconcile itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Name To Believe In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Forodwaith (Northland)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northland/gifts).



After shooting the traitor Stitch, Jayne spoke his last words to Canton. "All of you, you think it's enough for someone to drop money on you? Well, you don't need people like me. You just need people like you."

At least, that's how Selene recorded it in Canton's rather sparse library, for the future generations. Because by the end of the night, everyone in the bar remembered his words that way.

She'd been able to sit back and watch the shift. It started with Joshua's father, she thought, trying to make sense of his son's death, jumping between Stitch's gun and its target.

"Maybe," he said, staring in his cup instead of at his fellows. "Maybe he was saying we got to fix this ourselves. Joshua said Jayne was proud we had a riot. Proud there were too many of us for the magistrate to take back his money."

Selene considered correcting him for about a heartbeat, then closed her mouth.

She had no illusions about Jayne Cobb. What few she'd had got wiped out overnight, when he picked her to sleep with.

Not that she regretted it, exactly. She'd been sober enough; most of the high had been hero-worship. And it had been good. Jayne was big and crude, but he'd wanted _her_ to be enthusiastic, too. He'd been happy to see her in the morning, happy to do it again, and happy to come down with his arm around her. A guy who liked women, long and hard.

So her - not regrets. Lost illusions? - in the morning weren't sexual disappointment. That would've been easy. Part of her might still have believed the story of the hero of Canton if he had been a three-grunts-and-snore man; the part that knew she was just a mudder, deep down. Naw, it was something in treating her like a real person, that made her look at him again, and wonder.

The events of the day, the appearance of Stitch, Jayne's fury over Joshua's pointless death, they'd made the reasons for her fading sense of him as a hero clear.

"There's still too many of us for the magistrate," she said, quietly, but into one of the silences as the mudders groped for the point of the tragedy.

"They got the big damn guns," someone else said.

"But it's not all guns," she said. "We got to keep the money, right? They knew it then. We got roofs for our houses. We got some better food for a bit than mudder's milk." She didn't mention the books in the school, though it was what she'd spent all her share on. (The school was a joke, a seemingly random Alliance dictate that somehow had to get upheld or they'd come to Canton and see all the other abuses of law. The school was really someplace to store kids too young to work while their parents toiled. Nobody said they had to be taught well, or given any resources.)

"Maybe there's ways we can push," someone else said. "Maybe we can do some. Just people like us."

Selene smiled into her drink - not something she usually did, faced with mudder's milk.

The first nudge was just slowing down for the last hour, making it unproductive. Every damn last one of them. Saying how it might be, just might, that they'd be able to work just as hard as before with a bit better food, mind.

When they got that, they worked hard the rest of the day, upped production. And still stopped for that last hour. Allowed as how it was just too much to keep up the pace. Maybe if they could go home, sleep, be with family.

A bit more rest time, a bit more food. Plenty would have stopped right there, called it enough. It was easy to settle for dirt when you'd had nothing but crap.

If it weren't for the name of Jayne.

If it weren't for the new statue, to remind them. Not just Jayne, though he was there. Jayne bending over Joshua's body. A simple caption, "You don't need people like me." The magistrate had let it stay, at first, thinking that it was to remind them there were no heroes.

And that was why Selene never wrote down the words Jayne had really said, when she wrote the Story of the Formation of the Canton Collective. That was why she kept her mouth shut when people rewrote history hours after it happened.

Because they seemed to need a name to believe in, to do what they could do all by themselves.

#

**Author's Note:**

> For those with a shaky recollection, the actual words Jayne Cobb said were "All of you, you think there's someone just gonna drop money on you? Money *they* could use? Well there ain't people like that. There's just people like me."
> 
> This is for Forodwaith because I kinda promised it to her back in 2012. I wrote most of it then, too.


End file.
